Virus propagation on time-varying networks: Theory and immunization algorithms

B. Aditya Prakash, Hanghang Tong, Nicholas Valler, Michalis Faloutsos, Christos Faloutsos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

112 Scopus citations

Abstract

Given a contact network that changes over time (say, day vs night connectivity), and the SIS (susceptible/infected/susceptible, flu like) virus propagation model, what can we say about its epidemic threshold? That is, can we determine when a small infection will "take-off" and create an epidemic? Consequently then, which nodes should we immunize to prevent an epidemic? This is a very real problem, since, e.g. people have different connections during the day at work, and during the night at home. Static graphs have been studied for a long time, with numerous analytical results. Time-evolving networks are so hard to analyze, that most existing works are simulation studies [5]. Specifically, our contributions in this paper are: (a) we formulate the problem by approximating it by a Non-linear Dynamical system (NLDS), (b) we derive the first closed formula for the epidemic threshold of time-varying graphs under the SIS model, and finally (c) we show the usefulness of our threshold by presenting efficient heuristics and evaluate the effectiveness of our methods on synthetic and real data like the MIT reality mining graphs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2010, Proceedings
Pages99-114
Number of pages16
EditionPART 3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
EventEuropean Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2010 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Sep 20 2010Sep 24 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
NumberPART 3
Volume6323 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

OtherEuropean Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2010
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period9/20/109/24/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Virus propagation on time-varying networks: Theory and immunization algorithms'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this